Solving the problem of communication in a congalaxy.

[Chagen]

Recently, I have been getting an interest in Space Sims and thus in intra-galactic science fiction. So I've got a story rolling around in my head where Humanity has finally discovered interstellar travel via wormholes and Alcubierre Drives (I don't give a crap about how physics-breaking that is, this is a story after all), and which takes place in another galaxy (or the Milky Way itself, I'm undecided). Of course, planetary discovery in the vast uncharted galaxy is paramount--people need places to live after all, and while official expeditions are common, private explorers who can bypass endless bureaucracy are common, charting out planets for solar systems (usually a solar system is considered one massive sovereign state); the less one needs to be terraformed, the higher the payout, though sometimes planets rich in some kind of resource or useful for other purposes are desired too. And hell, some explorers travel just for the hell of it.

However, due to my Linguistics hobby, this has made me realize one thing: how the hell would anyone communicate in this galaxy? There are thousands upon thousands of languages on this one planet. Now imagine that humanity has colonized millions or even billions (and this is still a tiny fraction of the galaxy!) of planets. Any group of intrepid explorers who hop around can't learn a new language for every planet they go to. Hell, what if they want to deal with multiple nations on a planet? There's about two ideas I can see for this:

1: At some point, someone made an auxlang that is intra-galactically used. Explorers and other people who travel between planets/systems a lot simply learn this and everyone communicates that way. However, this is incredibly implausible: we can't agree on an auxlang on this one planet with 7 billion people. How exactly are trillions of people across millions of planets going to agree? On the other hand, the auxlang could be some old language like how Europe used to use Latin.

2: Machine translation technology has progressed past Google Translate's nonsensical gibberish and can perfectly translate languages. Actually seems kind of plausible (especially if an actually sentient AI translates like a human translator, though having sentient AI has massive implications on the rest of the setting...), but this requires languages to upload dictionaries and grammars to be downloaded; if a planet just hasn't, then we're back to square one (which could be a good plot for a chapter, I'll admit). However, this means everyone communicates through text, which could get boring.

This also raises the question of intergalactic news. If some important news comes from a system, then for it to spread around, it has to get translated...but there's not going to be a translator for every single language into every single language out there. Why would anyone on, say, Soleth Prime bother learning, say, Achaian if Achaia one nation on a planet in a system several hundred thousand light years away? To people on Soleth Prime Achaia is just one of the tiny dots in the night sky. Of course, people could just translate translations, but that's generally not a good idea. It's like the EU except a literally a billion times worse...

Of course, something that happens on Achaia probably has barely any impact on Soleth Prime. Which brings up an interesting idea: because of the vast distances between systems and planets, people just don't care about anything happening too far away. It'd be a regression to the state of the humanity before mass communication like the internet and telephone: humanity would live in mostly isolated bubbles, barely interacting with anyone except those right next to them. Why should you care if there's a war happening in some system you can't even see without a powerful telescope? People would just live ignorant lives unaware of all the crazy stuff going on around them. A recession that leaves thousands of solar systems and trillions of humans starving and broke would be an infinitesimally small blip in the overall scheme of things.

Man, space is big.

Of course, I could just be vastly overthinking this and letting the inner Linguistics nerd in me get in way of a good story. But this seems like an interesting problem to ponder.

[Bristel]

You're really inspired by No Man's Sky, right?

[Chagen]

Heeeeelllll yeah, baby!

NMS is one of the most gorgeous and anticipated games ever for me. Like, damn. I love the thought of exploring endless unknown planets and solar systems, never knowing what might come next. The purpose of this congalaxy is to merge Elite (Humanity has high amounts technology and is widely spread) with No Man's Sky (a huge portion of the galaxy is uncharted--time to find out what's in it!). This congalaxy also bends the rules a little: it's colorful and wild like NMS can be.

There was this gorgeous picture of a forest in one of the videos for the game, I can't find it now, but it still amazed me to this day.

EDIT: Found it!



Simply breathtaking.

[gestaltist]

I think an auxlang is not plausible. What would probably happen is that there would be several „lingua franca“ languages in strongly connected regions - probably pidgin versions of the languages of the dominant culture of the region. (A contemporary example of this would be the institutions of the EU - in informal settings, people there often speak an ungodly mix of several languages - an effect of constant communication with native speakers of 20+ different languages).

If you have wormholes, these „connected regions“ needn’t be close geographically. They only need to be close economically and/or politically.

Translation devices are possible, of course, but also not very helpful: with millions upon millions of languages, the device would either have to store all these languages in memory (and who would gather the data, I beg?) or it would have to be able to guess the meaning „on the fly“ - which would mean an unlikely level of sophistication from the AI. - Although a possible alternative would be a „Universal Machine Language“ that all these communicators would speak. Then they would only have to translate from one language they have been programmed for to and from this UML.

[zompist]

The basic conworlding question is how easy you make interstellar travel. How long does it take to get to the next language?

An hour: you'll get a lot of language mixing, and conquest, economic domination, or merely network effects could produce lingua francas.

A week: less mixing, but learning nearby languages is still something an ordinary citizen would find useful.

A year: only specialists will learn alien languages.

A decade: no one really needs to learn alien languages except in exceptional circumstances (like an invasion).


We're all language geeks here, but recall that most people really don't want to learn languages if they can possibly not do it. If the price of interaction is moderately high, you'll get only specialists learning languages. One model might be the Silk Road. Almost all travel on the Silk Road was 500 miles or less, so any particular merchant only needed to know 2 or 3 languages, enough to visit the neighbors. You didn't actually need to have people who traveled from Aleppo to Chang'an and spoke every language along the way.

The other factor to think about is what motivations there are to learn alien languages. If it's trade, a rough pidgin is acceptable. If it's religion or science, you just need a corps of translators. It's hard to think of a scenario where (say) 10% of the population learns an alien language unless political or economic domination is involved.

(If you've got aliens who are incredibly gifted for languages, then they would probably become the intermediaries for everyone else.)

[Sevly]

Machine translation [...] means everyone communicates through text

I don't see why. Skype translator already provides real-time voice-to-voice translation, and the people who've tried it out say that it's actually passable. Microsoft is working hard at making it more than that and you can bet Google Translate and the rest aren't twiddling their thumbs either. That's here in the 2015 and you're talking about a future society with Alcubierre drives; decent voice-to-voice machine translation is the far smaller leap.

You do still have the problem of being limited to some finite set of languages that are important enough to have been crosstranslationified, but those nowherelands on which the translator microbes break down make great fodder for subplots, while in known space they act as the backbone of multilingual confederations. How anyone communicated well enough to confederate in the first place then becomes a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem, but it will hardly be the first one that we somehow worked out. Yay bootstrapping!

I don't know to what degree of detail you'd want to go into with a translation device, but if your wormholes also provide effective superluminal communication then it seems likely that the data for translation would be streamed rather than stored locally, just like our devices today. (More plot fodder - you can be in the center of the universe, rather than on planet nowhere, and be just as screwed if the network goes down!) As for who would gather the data, I would presume it's the same people that gather the data behind the machine translation services of today—people looking to provide a service that is even more desperately useful than it is now.

Perhaps the best argument against translator microbes is that they are overdone, since a lot of works just take them for granted. But deconstructing them and playing with their limitations, with what happens when you first make contact with a new planet, or when you lose the network connection that makes your translator work in the first place, could allow you to distinguish yourself from the field while still taking advantage of a solution that is far more plausible than an galactic lingua franca. Take the potential for misunderstandings that you alluded to. Disasters brought about by desperate people who decide to translate the translation of the translation sound like something you could run with for a heck of a lot of fun.

[Chagen]

The basic conworlding question is how easy you make interstellar travel. How long does it take to get to the next language?

An hour: you'll get a lot of language mixing, and conquest, economic domination, or merely network effects could produce lingua francas.

A week: less mixing, but learning nearby languages is still something an ordinary citizen would find useful.

A year: only specialists will learn alien languages.

A decade: no one really needs to learn alien languages except in exceptional circumstances (like an invasion).


We're all language geeks here, but recall that most people really don't want to learn languages if they can possibly not do it. If the price of interaction is moderately high, you'll get only specialists learning languages. One model might be the Silk Road. Almost all travel on the Silk Road was 500 miles or less, so any particular merchant only needed to know 2 or 3 languages, enough to visit the neighbors. You didn't actually need to have people who traveled from Aleppo to Chang'an and spoke every language along the way.

The other factor to think about is what motivations there are to learn alien languages. If it's trade, a rough pidgin is acceptable. If it's religion or science, you just need a corps of translators. It's hard to think of a scenario where (say) 10% of the population learns an alien language unless political or economic domination is involved.

(If you've got aliens who are incredibly gifted for languages, then they would probably become the intermediaries for everyone else.)

I don't think you read the topic very well, because I didn't mention aliens at all. There are no aliens in this congalaxy, actually, or at least no other sentient and intelligent life (there's plenty of alien animals/fish/bugs/etc.), mostly because, as a human, I just plain don't care for non-human species in my fiction.

[zompist]

You didn't mention not having aliens.

It sounded like you wanted some feedback, but evidently not, my bad.

[Chagen]

Whether or not I have non-human intelligent life has nothing to do with the topic at hand though. Like...did you read the topic?

[Buran]

A contemporary example of this would be the institutions of the EU - in informal settings, people there often speak an ungodly mix of several languages - an effect of constant communication with native speakers of 20+ different languages.

This sounds really interesting. Can you give some examples?

[KathTheDragon]

The basic conworlding question is how easy you make interstellar travel. How long does it take to get to the next language?

An hour: you'll get a lot of language mixing, and conquest, economic domination, or merely network effects could produce lingua francas.

A week: less mixing, but learning nearby languages is still something an ordinary citizen would find useful.

A year: only specialists will learn alien languages.

A decade: no one really needs to learn alien languages except in exceptional circumstances (like an invasion).


We're all language geeks here, but recall that most people really don't want to learn languages if they can possibly not do it. If the price of interaction is moderately high, you'll get only specialists learning languages. One model might be the Silk Road. Almost all travel on the Silk Road was 500 miles or less, so any particular merchant only needed to know 2 or 3 languages, enough to visit the neighbors. You didn't actually need to have people who traveled from Aleppo to Chang'an and spoke every language along the way.

The other factor to think about is what motivations there are to learn alien languages. If it's trade, a rough pidgin is acceptable. If it's religion or science, you just need a corps of translators. It's hard to think of a scenario where (say) 10% of the population learns an alien language unless political or economic domination is involved.

(If you've got aliens who are incredibly gifted for languages, then they would probably become the intermediaries for everyone else.)

I don't think you read the topic very well, because I didn't mention aliens at all. There are no aliens in this congalaxy, actually, or at least no other sentient and intelligent life (there's plenty of alien animals/fish/bugs/etc.), mostly because, as a human, I just plain don't care for non-human species in my fiction.

If you simply read "alien" as "inhabitant of a different planet" then there's no problem here. Zomp's last sentence would probably be hard to make work, but the rest is fine.

[gestaltist]

A contemporary example of this would be the institutions of the EU - in informal settings, people there often speak an ungodly mix of several languages - an effect of constant communication with native speakers of 20+ different languages.

This sounds really interesting. Can you give some examples?

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21 ... king-union would be one example.

[Salmoneus]

If there is a lingua franca, it'll probably be something very old - like modern English. Nobody would actually speak this language fluently, but it wouldn't be hard for a small corp of traders, diplomats or scientists to learn a single standard language in a fixed, crystalised archaic form - particularly with video and audio recordings to compare with.

The more likely scenario, however, is that nobody bothers with a lingua franca, at least not on a universal scale, unless space travel is very quick. Instead, as Zompist says, most trade/travel/etc would be with your neighbours only. If anyone did want to go all Battuta and journey the known universe, they would just make use of chains of translators as they went from place to place.

But really, all this is moot. If you have millions of planets settled, we're talking about the vastly distant future. so who knows what they do. Maybe they just use their telepathy-ansibles.

[hwhatting]

Whether or not I have non-human intelligent life has nothing to do with the topic at hand though. Like...did you read the topic?

You're actually being quite rude here. E. g., I also read your initial post and it was in no way clear to me that all the populations and languages in that universe have to descend from an initial settlement from Earth.
But if that is the case, I'd agree with Sal - the trade language / lingua franca will most probably be whatever was the trade language / lingua franca on Earth when space exploration and settlement really got going - in a SF universe, there will be sufficient ressources to conserve and learn that language more or less as it was spoken at that point, and except for planets where for whatever reason the handing-down of historical and traditional knowledge is interrupted, people will have easy access to those conserves and learning materials, while any other language (auxiliary or natural) would have difficulties assailing the position of that established language.

[alynnidalar]

Whether or not I have non-human intelligent life has nothing to do with the topic at hand though. Like...did you read the topic?

You're actually being quite rude here. E. g., I also read your initial post and it was in no way clear to me that all the populations and languages in that universe have to descend from an initial settlement from Earth.

I have to agree--I too assumed from your post that they were going to be encountering aliens...

[Torco]

Chagen, come on, you're being really unpleasant, knock it off.

Regarding 2, C3P0 style is a lot more conservative and perhaps manageable a feature of your congalaxy, compared to Cortana-style AI. We often make machines specialized rather than generalists, even when they serve other purposes. For example, cars are excellent for what they're made: move 1 to 5 humans at 30 to 160 kph on paved roads running on gas: they make decent but mediocre carriages, presentable weapons plattforms, practically useless cross-country vehicles and shitty train locomotives, tho they can serve in all of those capacities: C3PO was such a machine, it was sentient and had a personality and whatnot but for matters other than serving as an interpreter he was pretty much a useless dolt: he was fluent in over whatever many thousand forms of communication tho'

regarding galactic auxlangs, the only way they're going to work is if some polity emerges and conquers most of the galaxy... And even that's going to last as long as it will; romlang-like clusters follow.

Still, the problem is a a lot less than it can be imagined: In general, if you're an alien and come, say, to earth, you only really *need* to speak english... and can get around quite well with english, spanish, mandarin, arabic and russian: this means your interstellar FTL spaceship only needs five language interpreters to trade and interact effectively with the whole planet: five people skilled in five languages is a very modest feat. And still, considering that a language is something it takes one about a year to learn, it becomes quite a modest concern: presumably, alcubierre drive ships need a broad and deep knowledge pool, including logistics, interstellar finance, astrogators, human resources officers, programmers, manufacturing technicians, life support maintenance personnel, security... a handful of language experts doesn't sound like it would put any significant dent in the budget.

[Buran]

[...] this means your interstellar FTL spaceship only needs five language interpreters to trade and interact effectively with the whole planet: five people skilled in five languages is a very modest feat. And still, considering that a language is something it takes one about a year to learn, it becomes quite a modest concern: presumably, alcubierre drive ships need a broad and deep knowledge pool, including logistics, interstellar finance, astrogators, human resources officers, programmers, manufacturing technicians, life support maintenance personnel, security... a handful of language experts doesn't sound like it would put any significant dent in the budget.

It might be better to have two interpreters per language. That way, they can practise their language regularly, and if one of them is incapacitated somehow you can still talk to the natives. These interpreters will probably also be crewmen with other useful skills: during the age of sail, many sailors spoke multiple languages; I can't remember reading about dedicated interpreters on sailing vessels. Unless bringing along otherwise useless crew members is very cheap, the interpreters will have to double as normal crewmen.

[Torco]

I suppose it has to do with market conditions as well: like, if 10% of my planet speaks mandarin then it's going to be very easy for me as an interstellar trading capitain planning a mission to the chinese space elevator to hire two security officers and one astrogator which speak mandarin, and maybe an apprentice crewman of mine also speaks it and hasn't told me for all i know. But aside from mandarin, let's say I'm not going to earth but I'm going to some other planet where the original colonists where all bantu speakers and no one has been there in 120 years of their time then I'm going to have to probably wait a few months for anyone who's studied bantu languages at all, so the one guy I find who does know swahili is going to have few difficulties to convince me to pay him a lot, let him loaf around all the journey and maybe even bring his wife and kids while we're at it.

[Curlyjimsam]

I have a (rather soft) sci-fi setting in which machine translation is able to monitor brain activity and so bases its translations directly on speakers' intended meaning rather than the words themselves. It's not 100% effective though. One big problem that remains is the translation of writing and audio recordings.

[Lambuzhao]

This is an interesting, thought-provoking topic. Regardless of whether the galaxy is all-human or interspecific, I think that technology would rise to the occasion by such time as warp-drives, etc, and machine/AI translators & interpreters, whether thought-pattern readers, droids, or, on the other hand, the classic flesh & blood variety, would pretty much exist side by side.

One thing I have found curiously applicable to this situation from attempting a various times to communicate with folk in their own conlangs: I'm always behind. In other words, based on what input of the language I have available, whatever responses I made are often branded "ooh, that's out of date", or "Oh, it isn't said that way anymore". I think I'm being current and cool and whatnot, but I wind up sounding, at best, in staid archaicized Quelle-[insert conlang], or, at worst, speaking Old Low [insert conlang] (extinct).
IMHO space travelers, especially deep-space travelers, will be faced with speaking ever-aging idiolects of their language, and will spend as much time "catching up" as translating messages from 'home'.

If there are going to be lingua-franca, they ought to be resistant to such linguistic viccisitudes, but, as is the nature of pidgins and contact-langs, they are sure to be cauldrons of linguistic changes.

About a common litterae francae. I think a pictographic to ideographic system might work best, somewhere in the ilk of Rebus, Chinese, Hieroglyphic Egyptian and/or Mayan Hieroglyphs. I had a similar idea wherein a group of Native American Nations from North Central and South America pooled resources and purchased their own torus-wheel space-colony. Though the tribes maintained their own languages and cultures, there developed a common writing system: a variant on Mayan hieroglyphs, where folks learned what the pictures meant but not the actual pronunciations, for common signage and general directives.

Similarly, some ideographic system may come about where the "idea" is understood, and just read in your own native tongue. But then that's a whole other language to learn, of course. And how do things like syntax get decided?

It's very interesting and mind-boggling to consider the permutations and ramifications!

[Lambuzhao]

It also depends on how long or instantaneous the trips take from Star System. I am unfamiliar with the games, so am unsure how long it can take to get from planet A to Planet B (in the same Star System), versus Planet A to Planet Q (in a neighboring Star System) versus Planet A to Planet AAABCDAZ1 (in the next Galaxy). If it does vary in length, one would probably adopt one or two closest neighboring dominant sprachbundlects/interplanetary pidgins/cosmocreoles, as per Zompist's suggestion.

If travel to all points is relatively instantaneous, political/economic forces will determine which of the above get used with more frequency. As Latin, Chinese and Arabic became the major Sprachbundlects on Earth, and English became the ultradominant 'Netlect, there will eventually arise a handful of
super-ueber-kingkamehameha "Local Group"-lects or SIN-lects (as history shows).

More: show

Or maybe even one Pantransuniversalect ? This is abundantly clear with English's overwhelmth on the Internet today...but who knows what the Internet will look like linguistically in, say, 300 years? Maybe more of a melting pot-stew of more equally-portioned natlangs, rather than a heaping plateful of English with a side salad of a smidgeon of every other world language diced up together tabbouleh-style. Anybody got a TARDIS to lend???

"Local Group" traditionally meant the Galaxies closest to the Milky Way, but here I am repurposing the word to mean all Star Systems connected by wormholes or easily accessible by Hyperdrive to Earth's Solar System. Maybe I mean the Solar Interstellar Neighborhood? But this does not include Star Systems which, for economic or political reasons, are made accessible to Earth, though they lie outside the SIN. If there is a more accurate name for this (is this sort of phenomenon referred to in the games in question?), please educate me!

[Lambuzhao]

I'm piggy-backing on Sal's and Torco's points. And especially Sal's point on instantaneosity of future space travel.
His point on the "far" futurity of this possible scenario reminds me of the later iterations in the Isaac Asimov shortie The Last Question

(a copy to read here)
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

I mean the time-periods somewhere between VJ-23X of Lameth & MQ-17J of Nicron, and maybe verging into that of Zee Prime & Dee Sub Wun.

The challenge is to not get too bogged down with inadvertently "steam-punking" this kind of scenario with too much "Earthiness".